TriQuarterly

Some of you may have heard that yesterday Northwestern decided to shutter TriQuarterly, eliminating editorial positions at the end of the academic year and then giving the name to a student-run electronic publication housed in the university's continuing studies unit.

The screws are tightening, and it seems that college administrators may not hold the literary journal, as a genre, in the esteem they might have 10 or 20 or even 30 years ago.

We need to make this case, and I continue to believe that one of the most effective ways to do so is to increase subscription numbers and make our reading visible. I love to disappear into my library's periodicals stack for hours, but now, perhaps more than ever, it's important to give literary journals the opportunity to count us in.

For some journals, increased subscriptions may give them some freedom, some insulation from budget cuts. For others, more readers may not stem the tide, but at least, even in the direst of circumstances, administrators will not be able, so easily, to suggest that these enterprises are irrelevant.